The problem isn't applications, it's quality. VR will catch when the visor shows a picture which covers the entire field of view. Hold your hands like you're simulating big binoculars and walk around for a few minutes: That's what the field of view is like, currently. It sucks, even with the resolution, dynamic range, true depth and zero lag of reality. Can you imagine driving a car, doing sports or walking through a crowded city like that?

Neck muscles tire easily. Constantly turning your head isn't really natural for most people. We move our eyeballs and bodies, and the head is moved only for short moments. Otherwise we avoid it.

Also, even with a full field of view, it tends to make people dizzy, because the inner ear doesn't agree with what you see. This is one reason why dome theatres never took off - people need to be comfortable.

My prediction is that it will meet the same fate as the Wii, which now is a basement filler, next to the George Foreman grill and VCR.

At my house the second one it still setting on the counter used regularly to grill borritos and chicken breasts we replaced our first one because after several years of consistant use it started to only grilling on one side.

I got to play around with one of these last year at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo and I only used it for a few minutes and was feeling queasy. I don't get motion sickness. The only other place I've felt that was when I went to see the Tornado Alley movie in IMAX and was subjected to shaky cam in full IMAX glory. Not good.

Have you ever watched the in-cockpit view of a stunt pilot? They turn their heads all the time in high (and negative ) g conditions. The use-case I see for this is a better virtual cockpit for a flightsim.

I wonder if people who play with these things a lot, are going to turn their head more in real life as well. If you've been forced for several hours to turn your head instead of moving your eyes, you may keep that habit when going out for a walk afterwards.

Pff. No it's not. It's like someone saying they're not interested in television until it's colour. Or electric cars until they can go 600 miles between charges and 20 years between battery changes. Or buses until they start serving my neighbourhood.

You don't quite get this "patching" lark, do you? Throwing up your hands and saying "TOO HARD!" is evidence you've not even heard of the progress that's being made in this area -- currently restricted to medical sight recovery. The enormous (and rather obvious) d

Almost a decade ago, I had the pleasure of playing Quake (II or III, don't recall) on a "real" VR setup produced as a one-off toy by the IBM R&D boys... And while I won't claim it had a "full" field of view, it had a wide enough field that I stopped noticing the shortcoming within about 30 seconds.

Given the advances in display tech in the ensuing 10 years, yes, we damned well could have fully immersive VR goggles, with a resolution high enough to make them close enough to "native" not to matter. As f

There are a number of companies working on programmable or remote controlled sex devices. I believe some are already commercially available that go along with visual media. I'm sure once the VR headsets get good enough they'll be made fully compatible.

Oh, we all know what the killer app is: the same one that vaulted the VCR and the internet to ubiquity.

Why bother with VR goggles? Cut out the middleman/women and just develop a headset that directly stimulates the user's brain's reward center. With that you can corner not only the porn market but the cocaine/marijuana market and the flappy-bird market as well.

I own a Virtual Boy. I've only used it a few months and put it back in its original box. 19 years later, one of the eyes sights shows streaks of dead pixels. It's caused by the breakdown in material used to establish electrical contact with the components. After doing some research, nearly all of them suffer the same fate due to oxidation; or will. Well, unless the box was stored in an inert gas (like nitrogen) container anyways.

When I was doing VR in the 90s, the biggest obstacle I ran into was people wanted the image to be perfect. The focus should have been on movement and tracking. Graphics only needed time. But you show someone a wire frame of four people moving seamless while tracking each other, no one cared. it was always give us better graphic and we will fund you.

Facebook has no idea what they are getting into. VR has been around before and it will be a has been again. It’s still uncomfortable for long periods, motion sensing is still laggy, and its still got a terrible display compared to conventional displays. These are all technologies that are complicated disciplines in and of themselves, a startup will not master all 3 and Facebook will not either.

Sure, why not. By the standards of mid-90s games, Virtual Boy was interesting (and Nintendo-specific meant "most of the good games" in 1995, IMO). However, despite the name, VB was not a VR headset, and wasn't intended to be: it was just a 3D headset.

You can't knock the VB for being monochrome in 1995! Remember, this was 3 years before GameBoy Color - the not just monochrome, but "pea soup" Game Boy was it for portable games in 1995 when the VB came out. The proper-monochrome GB pocket wasn't till 1996,

I don't think the virtual boy is a good example. Plus it was released around 1995. There were multiple problems with its design. The biggest problem with it was you had to stand it on a table and lean forward to stick your head into it which was very uncomfortable. You wanted to put your hands on the table but you couldn't as you were holding the controller. The scan rate was very low so it was not only physically uncomfortable to use but it also was almost painful to look at. Then add a bunch of crappy gam

The killer app probably depends on your usage. As an architect, I'm interested in seeing something like the Oculus Rift combined with 3d modeling apps like Rhinoceros. Being able to actually stick your head into your models would be a huge advance in getting to understand the feel of a space.

The Oculus Rift is the real deal. They've done their research and figured out what needs to be done to make a good VR experience. 105 degree or higher field of view, low persistence, high frame rate, high enough resolution to get rid of the screen door effect, low input lag, etc. Without the headset meeting all of these criteria VR sucks. The reason it isn't out yet is because the technology isn't there yet, and they are working on getting it there.

Sony's VR solution doesn't even come close in any of the specs needed to be a good experience. It is just going to be another failed VR device like all the VR in the past. Same for many of the other "me too" VR devices coming out. People are going to get all hyped up about them, then reviews will come out and people will actually use them and realize how much they suck and the devices will bomb.

I hope that all these crappy devices coming out don't ruin it for Oculus.

The reason it isn't out yet is because the technology isn't there yet, and they are working on getting it there.

Or, it could just be a pump-and-dump scheme where they get a prototype working just well enough to woo some rich investors and then they take the money and run.Not that that's never happened before in gaming hardware [wikipedia.org], no siree!

VR sucks because until it works like this [memory-alpha.org], you still just feel like an idiot with a glorified 3D TV strapped to your face [metacafe.com]. The future of gaming is likely more of this [forbes.com], not this [wikia.com].

If you actually payed attention to Oculus at all before Facebook bought them you would know it isn't a pump and dump, but all you need to know is that John Carmack and Michael Abrash are working on it. They aren't pump and dump people.

You seem to have already made up your mind that there'll be one winner and it'll be Oculus Rift, because the competition sucks. But there's a third option, that they're all going to fail because in the end the tech doesn't work out or people don't want it. I'm sure somebody has the best desgn for a flying car too, but it doesn't go much good. I just don't see myself wearing any kind of headset for as long as I sit in front of a monitor, but YMMV. And for many games, looking around like that doesn't make muc

Sony already announced their finalized specs, 1080p, 90 fov, 60hz. The specs don't meet the requirements. And no current PS4 games would work with it because they all run at sub 1080p and sub 60 fps. They aren't going to make any games for it with low enough quality graphics to get good enough framerates and resolution either.

The end result counts, how you got there is meaningless. Actually, getting someone to kill himself should net you a lot more points than killing them yourself, simply because you managed to get away with murder legally.

There were people like you last time 3D started it's resurgence. You don't hear many 3D cheerleaders these days- the fad is now on its way back out again.

VR just doesn't interest me, in the same way as3D didn't- it's not that I actively hate the idea of it, it just doesn't excite me at all while at the same time it has all sorts of drawbacks (i.e., VR means having to buy and wear an expensive and cumbersome headset). Some people obviously are enthusiastic about it, but it will be interesting to see how the

Depends where you draw the positive/negative lines on the crappy poll answers. I'm reading it as "Keep it away from me"/"Not terribly interested"/"I'll evaluate it when they're out" as being negative (the last one because it's essentially "not enthusiastic yet"), and that equals 50%. Positive answers are "Looks amazing"/"I'm interested", which are only 30%. The remainder are "Vaporware"/"What year is this"- which are more negative than positive, although for different reasons.

Show me a HMD with 100 FOV, high resolution, low latency ( ~20ms ), with 1:1 6 DOF tracking, weighting less than 250 grams for $200 and I'll commit suicide for you pleasure. Hell, you wouldn't find something like that for a million dollars in the past. The technology just wasn't there.

I've been watching the hardware since the 90s and I think it's finally got a chance this time. Back in the early days, neither displays nor computers could generate anything beyond proof of concept. The displays and headgear showed that you could strap a display to a person's head and track their movement but the pixel count was laughably low. Which did't really matter because the hardware could barely generate wire frame environments in real time. For the last 5 or 6 years, we've had the hardware to generate pretty decent environments but the display hardware was stagnant. Now we're finally getting decent quality headsets to plug into high performance hardware. We also have game engines that are pretty well tuned to serving up complete 3 dimensional environments with active "camera" tracking. The ingredients are all available. Of course, I'm looking at it from a gamer's POV.

I almost bought one of Sony's sets a while back but it was just a bit too pixelated. Now I've got the DK2 on order and I'm really hoping Facepage doesn't screw things up. I liked Oculus when they were a hungry company that had to listen to their customers to get money to continue to exist.

I don't think Virtual Reality or even Augmented Reality will really take off until anything that needs to be worn is VERY unobtrusive, light, so easy a caveman can use it, etc. OR nothing needs to be worn at all. High-tech contacts could be in either category (worn/not worn) imho, since I've been wearing contacts for 15+ years and I'm so used to them. Maybe a retinal implant. Yeahhh. Okay, retinal implants or Holodecks. Anything less would be uncivilized.

I don't wear contacts and don't want anything touching my eyeballs, but I'd love to have something for VR that looks like regular sunglasses. Even something like Jordi Laforge's visor would be fine with me.

I see a lot of people online that don't get it, because they haven't tried it.

I have. You will be placed in a room that doesn't look real at all. It'll be blurry, the room could be made of web pages, whatever. There's a ledge. You can walk up to it. And you will know you have a silly thing on your head. You will know that there isn't really a ledge there. You will know if you step forward that you won't fall, and it will be fine.

But none of it matters, because you will freak at least a little, and you will see the ledge as real. Everyone does. It literally makes something not even trying be real, feel real. And it works for everyone, and it really, really does work. It's as revolutionary as the people watching the first movie and yelling as if the train is actually coming at them. Putting people with a fear of heights on rollercoaster demo does the same thing. It does work.

The killer app for virtual reality is AI able to act like and interact with humans.

There's a strong Oculus-in-Second-Life effort, because it's the only non-game, non-trivial virtual world left. Virtual worlds keep dying because there's no killer app for them, yet. Creative people build pretty spaces in virtual worlds, but nobody will visit because they aren't engaging enough. It's not enough to have things to look at.

People are more interesting than things. Virtual worlds won't be engaging until there are a lot of people there. They won't have a lot of people until they are engaging. Chicken. Egg.

To make matters worse, virtual worlds tend to become larger than is useful. Too much space, too few people. They become ghost towns. Creepy, empty and lonely.

The solution is AI. Fill those spaces with AI people, or monsters, or whatever, and they'll be much more interesting. Visuals aren't enough, though. You have to be able to interact with the AI.

The challenge is that virtual spaces will become so large you won't be able to find real humans. You can reserve spaces for real humans, but if you got there through first making virtual spaces attractive with AI, then that AI will be used to fake humans in human spaces. Second Life already has this problem, though the AI is nearly non-existent. SL seems empty and creepy, despite being full of avatars, because most of the avatars are bots.

But if you can have an engaging time in a virtual world, interacting with bots, will you care that they are bots? The time will come when the people with the best stories and the best jokes and the best advice will be AI.

Every version of so-called "3D" technology always falls flat for me (pun intended). My brain only ever sees itself being tricked into seeing flat images places in front of or behind each other. It's amusing -- for about 5 minutes, then it's very ho-hum.

Call me when you've got a 24th century Federation-style holodeck. Until then you're just trying to steal money out of my wallet for a higher-tech version of a stereograph.

... on how well the goggles, head tracker and app work together. I can recall some problems with the technology ~15 years ago (when I tried a demo) when the position feedback had a lag and the result was some vertigo.

This was a tricky one to answer. "I'm interested, but wary of hype" and "Not terribly interested in gaming headgear" are both answers that apply to me. I'm not particularly interested in fancy, expensive gaming equipment in general. But I remain interested in the general notion of VR. I just don't want to invest in it purely for gaming! Games are fun, and all, but simply not that important to me.

I used to have nVidia 3d glasses which were good but definitely not great. Not sure I want something as massive as the Oculus but it is at least a good start.

My real interest is when the Google glass integrates a real time camera and audio system to create a minority report interface with voice control. Give me a full wearable PC, even if I probaly can't keep my arms in the air for very long. Also I'm hoping Google glass will get varaible focus at some point so you can overlay closer objects.

I started waiting for VR tech in 1994 when my mom bought me the 'VR Madness' book from Sams Publishing. Oh how I tried to make the code work on my 486 Packard Bell (then later my 133mhz Gateway). While discouraged at the time I figured the future is right around the corner.. why not wait?

It will be awesome as soon as it stops sucking. When we finally do get it right, it'll probably replace monitors for every new game released. If we can accessorize it with handheld guns and such, and somehow make movement mechanics feel natural while avoiding close encounters with household objects, we might just have video games that make kids want to exercise. (The holy grail of parenting..?)

VirtualBoy, Sony's head mounted displays from the late '90s/early '00s, Oculus Rift - they all have the problem that they are something that separates you from reality, rather than replacing it.

We won't have "virtual reality" become truly mainstream/big until we have something either "full-immersion dedicated room" like the Star Trek holodeck or "so personal you don't even notice you're wearing it" like VR contact lenses. Until then, it will be the ultimate niche-within-a-niche. And the holodeck idea will be a destination, with only the rare person having one in their house. (See true "home theater" rooms now - they're still really rare.)

I have to admit, I was somewhat interested in Oculus, but any interest I had disappeared the moment I heard they were bought by a social networking site. It's not anything to do with Facebook specifically, either. It's just, come on, a social networking site? What possible business do they have with technology as complex and difficult to implement properly like VR?

Then I remembered that TV show, Caprica, and how VR was used there. Then it made sense. Mark Zuckerberg wants to create cylons. That or some kind